So tomorrow (today) hasn't exactly been miserable, but it's getting around 3pm and I'm pretty tired. Though when I think that this is about when I left the hotel yesterday I'm not doing so bad.
The first time I was englished the morning was by a man in the breakfast room. I was sitting at the next table eating my bread and hot chocolate and he was finalizing plans for a business meeting the next day (on a side note, any time Algerians are making any kind of arrangement it sounds like a cross between each party scolding the other like a child and a regular old heated argument). When I got up, he stopped me and spoke to me in relatively clear if accented English. His name was Saïd from Barcelona. He told me he had just been visiting a good friend of his in Indianapolis. He said I was the first American he'd met in Algeria and said if I needed anything to ask his friend the waiter. In retrospect I could have explored the interaction a little more, but I was tired.
The second time I was englished this morning was by the guy at the front desk, but he was just stabbing in the dark. At first he tried German, and when I responded in French that I had no idea what he was saying he tried English.
I took a fairly long walk out to the martyr's monument this morning, highlighted by taking the long way, some choice graffiti spotting and seeing a couple uniformed cops checking out the watches being hawked by a streetside bootleg vendor. When I got to the bottom of the hill with the monument on top of it, I saw a broken down skytram and a steep sidewalkless set of hairpin curves up the mountain. I was just thinking how disappointing it was that the tram was out of service when I saw that there were people on it waiting to go up. Despite little to no maintenance on the building, missing windows and no sign on the entrance, the tram was running. I payed my passage of 15DA and rode up without incident. I took some pictures of the monument, but people with machine guns told me I couldn’t climb up on it. There was a museum in the base, which I checked out. It was more a museum of the French colonization that of the martyrs in particular. There were documents about the planned French invasion, maps of the colony and pictures and descriptions of the various resistants and resistances up to independence in 1962. There were lots of weapons on display, ranging from sabers and muskets to automatic pistols and bazookas. At one point there was a line of pictures showing victims of napalm, piles of bones exhumed from mass graves after independence, and French soldiers ushering Algerians into concentration camps. Classy move france. Ten years after world war two and taking a page from the nazi playbook. Below the main museum level there was a circular black marble arcade surrounding a memorial rock of some sort. No one else was there when I was, so it was extremely quiet.
When I got back outside, two motorists were arguing over a fender bender. The police arrived and everyone started talking animatedly. For the sake of cultural records, I slyly took some pictures, but one of the policemen saw me and told me not to. I got the feeling the only word he knew in French was 'interdit'.
There was a shopping center nearby where I picked up some postcards, a 7-up and a pizza. I was suspicious as soon as the woman at the restaurant offered me ketchup and mayonnaise to go with my pizza, but it ended up being decent, if different from what I'm used to. I took the lot into some woods nearby where I was surprised to see young Algerian couples all over each other behind each tree. So much for Islamic conservatism, I though, watching a woman in full headscarf making out with a bearded man down the path from my lunch spot. It's not quite like the parks in France, but closer to it than stateside for sure.
I rode the derelict tram back down the mountain and walked back towards my hotel, making a stop at an internet café along the way. The only reason the stop was notable is that it was a higher degree of difficulty that the typical internet café visit, since it was a French keyboard with a good number of the letters rubbed off and a broken space bar. Comme on dit, je me suis débrouillé. A year in france was good for something, eh?
On the word sketchy: I haven't used the adjective overmuch in this document, but it comes up all the time in my head when I'm walking around. Algeria strikes me as overwhelmingly sketchy. I think the impression comes from the fact that I'm almost always in a crowd, and there are almost always groups of people (read: men) loitering in doorways, corners and alleys. As such, I could describe almost anything here as sketchy. I won't, though.
On ambient music: The first song I heard upon arrival in the airport was 'hey there delilah' by the Plain White T's. Yesterday in the hotel elevator, 'independent woman' by Destiny's Child was playing. At the pizza place today up by the martyr's monument I heard what I'd describe as Arabic oldies. Like a middle eastern Sinatra.
A general observation: Trying to crunch Algiers down to a compact description is tough, but at different points it reminds me of France (without the French) and China. There's a Frenchness in the way people operate, from driving to buying baguettes and camembert. The café culture is a far cry from the one in Paris, but the flavor is there and it's weird to see in the absence of anything else overtly French except the language. The China is in the pace and the developingness of things. Maybe if I'd been to more developing countries I'd be more inclined to chalk it up there. There's a sense of fast, cheap and out of control to things, which is distinctly unfrench. It's a vaguely joyful willingness to ignore the litter and concentrate on the future of the country. Of course in the meantime there's still the litter all over the place, but all in all it's not a terrible attitude.
A little in the same vein, the sidewalks are paved here like in China. That is to say, with slippery patterned flagstones. Unlike in China, though, there is no row of bricks with raised bumps so blind people can find their way. On the other hand, I did pass the deaf/mute association of Algiers on the way home today.
There's no obvious key to the dress code here. I see men wearing anything from jeans and hoodies to business suits to traditional robes and sandals; and as wide a variety of facial hair and clean shaven-ness as anywhere. For women, full covering seems less prevalent with younger generations, but at no point have I sensed tension between more and less conservative dressers. I've seen women walking and talking together, one with no head covering and the other with only her eyes exposed.
Small victories: I made it to 420 without falling asleep. I'm going to go out and see if I can get some shots of the crowd, look for a bag of milk and some dinner food, maybe something for lunch tomorrow too if I'll be on the bus/in tipasa.
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